The instructions for playing Pong

Pong - the first massively successful video game - has just turned 40 years old. The original Pong machines were placed in bars and pubs, like pinball machines or fruit machines, but they attracted whole new groups of users who were not already players of slot machine games. Which raises the question: given that the technology and the type of game were wholly new to most of those who played it and loved it, how did they learn to play Pong?

From the kind of guidance we produce for students learning to use our online learning systems, you might think that there would have had to be some pretty long and detailed instructions. A lot of things would have been unfamiliar and would have needed to be explained: the rules of the game, how to use the control knobs to move your bat up and down the screen, what happens when the ball hits your bat, what happens when the ball goes out of play, how score is kept, and so on.

You might think that, but you'd be wrong.  The instructions for playing Pong, printed on the machine cabinets, read as follows:

Avoid missing ball for high score.

That's it; there was nothing else. Or rather there was a whole lot else: the physical features of the machine and the experience of experimenting with the game. The coin slot was a familiar affordance for the insertion of a coin, which started the game. The knobs were obvious controls, and nudging them visibly moved the paddles on the screen. The contact between the ball and a paddle was marked as a significant event by the distinctive "pong" sound, and one or the other of the numbers at the top of the screen could be seen to increase whenever the ball went off a left or right edge, which was also accompanied by a negative sound. The one thing which the games designers judged needed explaining was the object of the game: to get a high score by avoiding missing (not, interestingly, "hitting") the ball. The single instruction also, as a bonus, identified the dot on the screen as a representation of a ball, which together with the game's name printed on the machine casing ("pong" does not carry its unfortunate British meaning in the USA, and to its first American users would have suggested only "ping pong"), provided further clues to interpretation from the real-world.

I'm not suggesting that instructions for students using online learning systems should be as brief as the original instructions for Pong, but I do challenge our tendency to strive for thoroughness and explicitness. Consider the advantages of brevity: first, students are more likely to read it; and second, by actually requiring students to fill in the gaps for themselves, they have to think about what they're reading and activate their previous knowledge in order to interpret it - in other words, the learning is deeper and more likely to be retained. Of course, not every single student will be able to manage with brief instructions - there may be some key piece of background knowledge which they lack, or  some distraction may lead them to a wrong interpretation; but most will, and will benefit from the brevity, and for those who need it we can also provide longer, more detailed guidance which holds their hand while walking them through stage by stage. (And those who need to refer to the detailed guidance will probably not need all of it.)

I adopted this approach a couple of years ago, when revising the guidance for new users of the Elluminate Live! audiographic conferencing system. The full Walkthrough ran for 15 pages, and included screenshots to show what should be happening at every stage of installation and setup, but I also produced a 2 page Short Guide, without screenshots, for those users who were used to installing new software and adjusting settings, and needed only a few essential details. Earlier this year, I was pleased to see the new edition of the Open University Computing Guide adopting the same strategy: prefacing its information on each feature of the Virtual Learning Environment with a Quickstart  page for those who neither want nor need the full detail.

Not always, but most of the time, less is more.

Reference

Katie Salen and Eric Zimmerman, Rules of Play: Game Design Fundamentals (MIT Press, 2004), p. xiii

The slot: establishing dialogue between teacher and learner

We were planning a new edition of some distance learning books, when it turned out that our new tagging system for page layout couldn't reproduce some of the tables quite as they'd appeared before. The tables in question were ones with blank cells, to create empty spaces for the students to fill in themselves as part of learning activities. The technical difficulty raised the question: did we really need these responses spaces in the printed books? And if so, why?

I remembered Fred Lockwood's list of recommended features of learning activities, in which a response space or grid was one - the others being a title, a rationale ("if you cannot think of a good reason why it is worth posing the activity perhaps it isn’t worth posing at all!"), an indicative time, instructions, a example, and feedback. Though a space or grid didn't seem to make much difference to whether students actually wrote a response to the activity (as distinct from just thinking about it - what Lockwood called "degradation" of the activity), research found that students did like and prefer having one. But why, if they often did not use it?

One thing which a response space provides is what discourse analysts call a "slot". This use of the term was coined by the pioneering conversation analyst Harvey Sacks, to describe the way in which one speaker can create an occasion or opportunity for another speaker to take over or make a specific kind of response. Asking a question, of course, creates a slot; a more subtle example - the one which was the starting point for Sacks' analysis - is "This is Mr Smith, may I help you", which without actually asking the telephone caller their name (which would be inappropriate on a confidential helpline) provides a cue for them to do so. A blank response space on a printed page, in the midst of the teaching text, is in visual terms almost literally a slot, providing a cue and an opportunity for the reader to make a response.

And what a slot does is open up the possibility of dialogue. Presentational text on its own can become a monologue: a single teacherly voice telling the reader how things are. A learning activity, when embedded in the text, establishes the expectation that the reader can and will respond and that that response is a valuable and important thing. Whether or not there is a response grid on the page or screen, and whether or not a student actually writes a response in it or even thinks about a response more than perfunctorily, the slot is there: a response can be made. Even though the medium itself is one-way and non-interactive, there can still be multi-vocal dialogue: what is modelled to the student, and what is encouraged to take place in their mind, is a conversation which moves back and forth between two voices, between teacher and learner.

That back-and-forth conversation enables teaching materials to deliver what Derek Rowntree called a "tutorial in print", in which students are called on to be active participants in their learning. And it is one of the many respects in which teaching materials are not about transmission of information, but about the establishing of relationship and dialogue: the socio-cognitive environment in which learning can occur.

References

Fred Lockwood, Activities in Self-Instructional  Texts, Open and Distance Learning Series, Kogan Page, 1992, p. 122, p. 129

Derek Rowntree, Preparing Materials for Open, Distance and Flexible Learning; An Action Guide for Teachers and Trainers, Open and Distance Learning Series, Kogan Page, 1994, p. 14

Seen and heard: November 2012

The Australian Voices - antipodean a capella choir, performing new (and fun) Australian music at a Milton Keynes church.

Graham Gibbs keynote address at faculty workshop - inspirational reminder of how assessment shapes student learning behaviour, unproductively or productively, from one of the gurus of learning design.

Secret State - Channel 4 drama, with Gabriel Byrne playing a decent and honest Prime Minister. The journey was better than the destination, and altogether not a patch on its predecessor A Very British Coup.

Last Tango in Halifax - BBC romantic comedy, with Derek Jacobi and Ann Reid as teenage would-be sweethearts reunited in their senior years. Great to see a drama in which the old folks are normal and its the younger  people who are in chaos.

The Hour, Series 2 - BBC drama set in (BBC) 1960s newsroom; no great depth, but full marks for style and performance.

Giulio Cesare (Julius Caesar) - video recording of David McVicar's hit 2005 Glyndebourne production of Handel's opera, shown at The Stables as a half-day event with a long interval for picnic lunch; definite added value over watching the DVD at home.